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Procedural Scaffolding for Input and Output in CLIL

Scaffolding is a key concept in education, not just in CLIL. In bilingual contexts, however, it is of even greater importance. If learners are successfully to access content through a vehicular language, then that content must be carefully scaffolded. Content and concepts must be understood and attention drawn to the salient language. The concept of scaffolding itself is rather simple and in fact parents do it with their children quite naturally without even realising it. This just goes to show that it is not necessary to be an expert in education in order to scaffold somebody’s learning. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out a few simple principles that can be followed by teachers when thinking about how to scaffold their students’ learning when teaching content through a foreign language. In the videos below, this has been broken down into scaffolding for input and scaffolding for output. The former is based around ways in which techniques for writing low-literacy materials can be exploited in order to help learners in processing texts which provide access to content. The second video looks at how to create the best possible conditions for promoting students’ spoken and written output. Both approaches could be termed “procedural scaffolding” as they are based on ways of working which can be applied to any subject and any level.